Information wants to be unlocked

But the reality remains that a new generation of researchers prefers to seek information online, a trend made all too clear to Mr. Hastings of the National Archives last year, after Google, in an experiment of sorts, digitized 101 of the National Archives’ films — including World War II newsreels and NASA footage — and put them up on its site, at video.google.com/nara.html.

“Before that happened, we had 200 requests total for the whole year in our research room,” Mr. Hastings said. “The first month the films were available on Google, there were about 200,000 hits on them — a thousandfold increase.”